How to spot storm damage on your roof from the ground

The morning after a big blow through the Medway valley, five minutes with your feet on the ground can save you a winter of trouble. Storm damage caught the same week is usually a £150 to £450 repair. The same damage found at Christmas, via a bedroom ceiling, rarely is. Here is the walk-around, in order.

First: stay off the roof

Nothing in this article involves a ladder. Wet tiles, loosened fixings and gusty weather are how homeowners end up in hospital. Everything below is done from the pavement, the garden, or an upstairs window of the house opposite if a neighbour will let you. If a check needs more than that, it needs a roofer.

The ground-level circuit

• The lawn and borders. Broken tile, slate or ridge mortar on the ground is the clearest signal there is. Keep any pieces, they tell a roofer exactly what let go.
• The roofline against the sky. Stand back and scan the ridge and the slopes. A tile out of line, a gap in the row, a ridge tile sitting proud. On slate roofs look for the bright rectangle where a slate has slipped and exposed fresher material underneath.
• Gutters and downpipes. Look for sags, separated joints, and overflow staining on the brickwork. A gutter knocked out of line by debris drains badly for years if nobody notices.
• The chimney. Check the stack for leaning pots, missing mortar and flashing peeled at the edges. Chimney flashing is one of the most common leak sources we see after storms.
• Flat roofs, from an upstairs window. If you can look down on a garage or extension roof safely, look for lifted edges, tears and anything the wind has dropped on it.

Inside the loft, with a torch

Pick a dry day or wait for the next rain, both tell you something. Daylight showing through the roof where it should not, damp patches on the felt, or drips during rain all mean water has a route in. In older houses without felt you are looking at the back of the tiles themselves, and any new daylight is worth a photo.

What to do with what you find

Photograph everything from where you stand, note which slope faces which way, and send it over. Most storm repairs price straight from good photos: slipped tiles run £150 to £450, and if water is actively coming in, an emergency make-safe and tarp-over at £150 to £350 protects the house until the weather allows a proper fix. The full ranges are on our price guide and the detail of what we fix is on therepairs page.

If you are claiming on buildings insurance, those same photos are your evidence. Take them before anything is touched, and ask for a written quote, which insurers accept as supporting documentation.

What the wind actually does to a roof

Storm damage is rarely random. Wind does not push tiles off, it lifts them: gusts create suction across the slope, and the tiles that go first are the ones whose fixings were already tired. That is why a storm so often exposes a roof's age rather than causing the damage outright, and why the same house loses tiles in the same corner every time. Ridges, verges, and the edges of slopes take the worst of it, which is exactly where the ground-level scan should linger.

Flat roofs fail differently. Wind gets under a lifted edge or a loose trim and peels, so the damage is at the perimeter and often invisible from below. If a felt or rubber roof is more than fifteen years old, the week after a named storm is a good time for that look from the upstairs window even if nothing ended up on the lawn.

The one-week rule

Storm damage does not heal. A slipped tile lets water onto felt that was never meant to be rained on, and every week it waits, the repair bill compounds quietly. If the walk-around finds anything, give it a week at most before someone qualified looks at it. In Tonbridge, Sevenoaks or anywhere on our patch, that someone can be us.